Peter Pitseolak, Dorothy Harley Eber, Ann Hanson People from Our Side

Annotation

The text of People from Our Side consists of Peter Pitseolak's manuscript -- originally written in syllabics -- and a narrative drawn from interviews conducted by Dorothy Eber with the help of young Inuit interpreters. Peter Pitseolak learned the system of reading and writing brought by the missionaries and from an early age formed the habit of keeping a diary. He took his first photograph for a white man who was afraid to approach a polar bear and later, in the early 1940s, acquired his own camera and taught himself, with the help of his wife Aggeok, to develop films in igloo, tent, and hut. His pictures catch, as no white photographer's could, the authentic quality and detail of Eskimo life in the last days of the camp system.